Holiday memories

The tea shop tat has featured sooner than expected, courtesy of a rather foul day in Edinburgh, where I didn't bestir myself to find a blip early enough, as I was emptying my email box in my dressing gown until about 12.30pm. By that time, the rain had settled in.

Anyway, here you have a ceramic purchased in Maggie's tea shop in Camnusgaul, mugs from Achins Bookshop in Inverkirkaig and Nanny's in Shieldaig, cold pressed highland rape seed oil from The Pantry in Cromarty, and finally a tea towel from the Blair Atholl watermill and teashop. Not featured, because it wasn't bought in a tea shop, is the beer and other things such as chutney and oatcakes we bought from the Black Isle brewery.

These are all highly commended in the tea shop category, although for food I don't think any of them beat the one place where we didn't buy any tat, namely the Bridge Cafe in Poolewe.

Comparative tea shop studies, a major subdiscipline of comparative food and drink studies more generally, has played an important part of the last two weeks. So has the assumption that one never had to worry about "getting a blip", because there would always be something glorious on the camera at the end of the day. Today has brought me down to earth with a bump. However, the good news is that Mr A (who was more prescient than I this morning with the camera), has declared that we are "still on holiday", and presented me with a nice cold beer to accompany my blipping and further emailing activities this afternoon. How very nice. Hope the boss doesn't see this. Oops, I just sent her the link to the holiday sequence of photos...